Where do we go from here!
I remember watching the images of the World Trade Center collapsing on TV
and a friend of mine saying that the world would never be the same again. It
turns out that many people around the country were thinking and saying the
same thing. I have often wondered what this attack would mean for the future
directions of our policies as a nation and our values as a people and, indeed, how
we make decisions to intervene in any situation around the world, whether it be a
military or economic or educational intervention or a choice for no intervention at
all.
I remember reading articles about the Taliban and their involvement in
Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks and most people in the United
States did not know where Afghanistan was located and had to look it up on a
map. The same thing occurred when we decided to go to war in Iraq even though
the United States had intervened militarily in the region in 1991, an intervention
called the Gulf War.
Not only did we not know the geographic location of a country to which we would
commit billions of dollars without much thought and analysis, but we did not
know the language nor much about the culture nor did we take into consideration
the historical and political development of the country nor did we know much
about the religions in the country.
Indeed, of the several hundred people working at our embassy in Iraq, only 6
spoke Arabic with any degree of fluency. Unfortunately, we often implement military solutions to problems overseas
without spending the necessary time and effort to prevent conflict by investing in
infrastructure, education, and health systems and taking the time to understand
the challenges on the ground. This would include, in my mind, understanding
the religions of the country and how they interact, the role of women in the
society, the history of democratic traditions in the country, the perception of
the country’s population towards the United States, the stratification of that
country’s society, and the nature of the centers of power in that country to name
only a few of the considerations that must be taken into consideration before any
intervention of any type should be considered. Indeed, we have a lot to learn
from our anthropologist friends in terms of how to assess an environment before
drawing any conclusions or attempting to be of help.
An example of what I am talking about was portrayed in the movie Charlie
Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks. It was a movie about how the United States
supplied and advised the Taliban and others fighting against the troops of the
former Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s. When the victory
was finally won in 1989 and the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, our government
thought that was it and any other expenditures of money for things like building
schools and training teachers and health needs were essentially eliminated from
our foreign aid for Afghanistan.
In my opinion, we therefore could have sowed the seeds of our conflict in
Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region through our lack of investment in
schools in Afghanistan. We may have won the war there against the former
Soviet Union but we lost the peace. The Taliban had an open field in which to
work in Afghanistan since 1990 when we left shortly after the Soviet Union did
and we did not take advantage of the fact that Americans were very popular in
Afghanistan and that Afghans wanted to have good schools for their children after
decades of war.
The same thing happened in Central America where the Schweitzer Institute
spends a lot of its time and effort. After the civil wars there ended in the late
1980’s and early 1990’s, the United States cut most of their aid to the region
because a military solution had seemingly been reached. Indeed, my friend the
1987 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and two time President of Costa Rica, Dr. Oscar
Arias told me that he felt that the region was almost completely abandoned in
terms of non-military aid to Central America with the arrival of a relative peace
by the signing of the Peace Treaties. Although this abandonment is not the only
reason, there has been a steady increase in emigration from these countries
to the United States and there has been an increase in the drug trafficking
throughout the region as this is one of the few opportunities to become wealthy.
Both of these problems have exacerbated the problems of poverty and increased
the amount of violence in the region.
One of the biggest problems I see in our relationships with other countries is the
idea of American exceptionalism. I have heard many of our political candidates,
especially on the right, assert that the world needs American leadership, that we
alone seem to have the inherent right to lead other countries and that America
has become less exceptional under our current administration. Such a position
is arrogant and leads us to make unilateral decisions without consultation
with our allies or to ignore their opinions entirely even if our friends give their
opinions. While I have criticisms of our current administration, I do think that
their basic instinct is correct which is to consult with our allies often and be
a part of solutions as in Libya and to thoroughly assess the situation before
an intervention, especially a decision as serious as the one to go to war or to
retaliate, something I would avoid like the plague.
When I was growing up into manhood, the idea that the west or the democratic
world was fighting against the evil ideal of communism was a quite prevalent
position to take in the United States. My Dad, when he was angry, would
sometimes say that the only good communist was a dead communist. A
communist was that dreaded other off in another world who was trying to
undermine democracy and eliminate religion and God. Then on my first visit to
Brazil when I was 16, I actually met one. He seemed to have the normal amount
of legs and arms, a big head of hair that I was jealous of, and there were no horns
growing out of his head. I got to thinking that perhaps other communists were
actually human beings also and slowly, I changed and started wondering if the
stereotypes I had heard in my closed society about black people were true and
then it just snowballed. It culminated for me in my work with the Schweitzer
Institute whose basic philosophy is something called Reverence for Life, that
we are all life struggling to survive on this planet and that anything that has
what Albert Schweitzer called a will to live should be regarded as sacred. For
Schweitzer, that meant plants, animals, and humans all had the desire to live and
should be regarded with awe. When we view other humans with awe, it becomes
very hard to kill them.
I am also very interested in a concept called the Responsibility to Protect which is
being promoted by the United Nations. It comes from the former Secretary
General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and his experience as the person in
charge of the UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda and Burundi around the
time of the genocide that occurred there. In his capacity as the head of UN
Peace Keeping forces, SG Annan tried to get over 100 countries to help out in
some way, but not one country including the US offered any help. As a result of
800,000 people dying, Kofi Annan initiated a process at the United Nations in
which he asserted that when a country cannot or will not take care of its own
people, then there is a moral obligation to protect those people despite any
claims of national sovereignty. I was the only North American to sit in a meeting
of all Spanish speaking diplomats from all of Latin America organized by the Arias
Foundation in Costa Rica. Each diplomat had to get up and state their opinion
about this idea of a moral obligation to protect endangered people in their own
country and each in turn turned to me and said I beg your pardon, I don’t mean to
insult you, but I am worried about the history of intervention in my country by
your country. When they were done enumerating the incidents of US
intervention in their country, they all turned back to me and said that they hoped
that I would excuse them for their remarks. Nevertheless, most countries
thought that under the right conditions, intervening in another country would be
necessary and that a number of countries, not just one no matter how
exceptional, should make the decision to intervene in the affairs of another
country. Haiti was mentioned as an example of a failed state where intervention
is necessary and nowadays, Somalia is mentioned as another failed state where
thousands of children are right now starving to death. This idea of a
Responsibility to Protect should be given thorough consideration in the coming
years and I hope it passes the United Nations soon.
Where I hope we go and that some of us learn from 9/11 is the need to learn
where these countries are located, engage with others, learn about their cultures,
make friends, listen to differing opinions, to avoid military interventions at almost
all costs, and support humanitarian projects that take the opinions of locals into
consideration, and indeed, are even designed by locals, not just the elite in a
country. I would propose that we do that continuously no matter who might
disagree with us and treat the populations and representatives of all countries
that politically, philosophically and theologically, they are exceptional.
